A shortened and updated version of the advice that David Harley and Andrew Lee gave to potential phish victims in an earlier paper. Part 3 of a three-part article on phishing scams old and new, and some of the ways to recognize the baited hook.

A crime wave of malware that demands money from victims to avoid prosecution by the FBI has been alarming web surfers across America. Victims suddenly find their computer frozen, and an official-looking page, like the one shown below, is displayed in their web browser. The FBI and the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) have received

News of SMS (text) phishing scams are nothing new to readers of this blog. ESET researcher Cameron Camp recently wrote an article explaining how they work and how to avoid them here on ESET’s Threat Blog: SMSmishing (SMS Text Phishing) – how to spot and avoid scams, And just before Valentine’s Day, my colleague Stephen

Phishers always try to find new ways to bypass security features and trick ‘educated’ users. Over the years we have seen simplistic phishing attempts where the required information had to be typed into the e-mail body. This worked at that time because phishing was new and hardly anyone had a notion of the implications. Later,

Introduction Mobile World Congress 2012 is almost upon us, and one of the most hotly-anticipated topics is the next generation of Microsoft’s smartphone operating system Windows Phone 8, which has been kept under wraps far more tightly than its PC counterpart, Windows 8. While Microsoft was an early adopter in the creation of smartphones with

Yesterday’s announcement by the US Department of Justice that the operators of file-sharing site Megaupload had been indicted for operating a criminal enterprise that generated over $175 million by trafficking in over half a billion dollars of pirated copyrighted material has sent shockwaves across the Internet. The accuracy of those figures may be questionable, but

An article came out yesterday from Clement Genzmer who is a security engineer at Facebook. His tagline is "searching and destroying malicious links". Those of us in the business of digital security and safety can certainly identify with that, especially the part where we aim to identify the criminals and work with law enforcement to

The death of Osama bin Laden has gone viral, with blogs, social media and search engines pumping terabytes of rumor, innuendo and conspiracy theories at the speed of light, along with the occasional kilobyte of truth. As the number of people searching for pictures and videos of bin Laden’s execution has skyrocketed, the criminal syndicates

[NOTE: As we were publishing this articl, our Latin American office discovered another Black Hat SEO campaign incorporating promises of Osama bin Laden videos on Facebook. Click here to view their article in Spanish. We will follow up on this shortly. AG] The malware phenomenon started by the announcement of Osama Bin Laden’s death continues

Not using Twitter or Facebook is, in these times, akin to not owning or using a mobile ‘phone. Last night’s events – the reported death of Osama Bin Laden – proved that we are well and truly in the Twitter era (Twitter reported that over 4000 tweets per second were made immediately preceding the President’s

Just a quick follow up on the Microsoft Security Advisory (2501696) post that my colleague Randy Abrams wrote about on January 28th regarding Microsoft's recent MHTML vulnerability, which is listed by ESET as HTML/Exploit.CVE-2011-0096.A in our signature database. Although reports remain low so far, any vulnerability in a particular version of Microsoft Windows

This weekend, an unnamed worm forced Microsoft to temporarily suspend active links in Live Messenger 2009, in order to prevent the aggressive worm from spreading further. This is quite a surprising measure, because worms spreading through Instant Messaging (IM) such as Skype, Yahoo! Messenger and Microsoft Live Messenger are not new at all! For example,

Every layer of protection you add will harden the target against cybercrime. SmartScreen technology found in Internet Explorer 8 has recently clocked over 1 billion blocked potential malware downloads from malicious sites. By way of Terry Zink’s blog: 1 billion malware blocks is an amazing milestone and an example of two things. First socially engineered

While the jury’s still out about whether the intent of the past month’s mass webserver breaches are fully criminal, Dancho reports new developments which also link Koobface activity into this command and control structure:

Yet another mass sites compromise is currently taking place, this time targeting DreamHost customers, courtesy of the same gang behind the U.S Treasury/GoDaddy/NetworkSolutions mass compromise campaigns.

This week there have been several major malware injection campaigns against WordPress blogs and other php-based content management systems. This malware injection battle began last week with Network Solutions and GoDaddy. Recently researcher Dancho Danchev has found evidence linking two US Treasury sites into the malware injection campaign: What's particularly interesting about this campaign is

Earlier this month, we reported on the massive new Koobface campaign making the rounds through Facebook and how it tricked users into downloading and running it through that tenet of social engineering, the fake codec. We now have a video showing how the Koobface worm tricks users into running it: NOTE: The audio is not

We have discussed SEO poisoning extensively in the ESET Threat Blog, and it should come as no surprise to our readers that any topic which trends up quickly in search engine traffic will be exploited by the criminals who specialize in such activities. The poisoned search term du jour is "erin andrews death threat". Apparently,

The Apple iPad is the current gadget du jour amongst the digerati and has been seeing strong presales, with estimates as high as 150,000 units on the first day. With such attention in the media and the blogosphere, it is no wonder that both legitimate businesses and scammers have taken to using it as bait

It is public knowledge that the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was hit in the face which left him with facial injuries, a broken nose and several broken teeth. The video of the attack is circulating on the Internet but at this time, if you search for them on any search engine it is possible